Ateliê na Rue de Furstemberg

Bazille painted this room in 1865, in a building he had chosen partly for its address. The studio sat on the little Place de Furstenberg on the Left Bank of Paris, and across the courtyard was the studio Eugène Delacroix had worked in until his death two years earlier. Delacroix was the painter this whole young generation revered, and living almost in his shadow seems to have been the draw. Bazille shared the place with his friend Claude Monet, both of them still years away from being called Impressionists. The canvas is quiet and domestic, an open window and a few pictures on the wall. Bazille would be dead within five years, killed at 28 fighting in the Franco-Prussian War.